By Samuel Liaw
After receiving the top ranking from the Canadian legal magazine Canadian Lawyer, the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law looks forward to some changes.
Over the next five to six years, it plans to expand from 75 students to 100, for a total of 300 LLB degree students from 225.
"This will enable us to offer a more comprehensive curriculum," said Faculty of Law Dean Dr. Patricia Hughes. "We are also planning to hire more professors with the objective of maintaining our current student-faculty ratio, despite the increase of students. We will continue to appoint seasonal instructors to teach some courses."
Having well-qualified lawyers as seasonal instructors and maintaing a relatively small student-faculty ratio are very important factors to the faculty. Those were the main reasons why the law school received top honors. The Faculty of Law hopes to maintain this despite its ambitious plan for expansion.
"We need to maintain the faculty-student ratio and we need to ensure that our curriculum prepares students for practice in a complex and sophisticated legal world," said Dr. Hughes.
More improvements will also be made in the Murray Fraser Hall building.
"We will be improving the library collections, upgrading technology and making renovations to the building," said Dr. Hughes.
Law students are very excited about the changes, which will lead to more opportunity and diversity.
"This would mean a greater variety of courses available to the students as well as exposing the students to new subject areas and experts in those areas," said Linda Lynch-Staunton, President of the Society of Law Students. "Ultimately, it will give students a competitive edge because they not only have the advantages of a small school atmosphere, the changes will allow the students to capitalize on increased course offerings, increased faculty and resources available to them in their educational pursuits."